“Everything for him was a conspiracy theory, everything. George Soros was the one behind everything, he was the one buying the whole Democratic Party, he was the epicentre of what is going wrong in the United States of America.”
Sayoc’s social media revealed more. On the day the pipe bomb was discovered at George Soros’s house, Sayoc reposted a meme claiming, “The world is waking up to the horrors of George Soros.”
Sayoc later pleaded guilty to 65 counts, including intent to kill or injure with explosives, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
So how did George Soros come to be regarded by so many as the evil mastermind at the heart of a global conspiracy?
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In the UK, Soros is known as “the man who broke the Bank of England” in 1992. Along with other currency speculators, he borrowed pounds, and then sold them, helping to drive down the price of sterling on currency markets and ultimately forcing the UK to crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In the process he made $1bn.
The Hungarian emigre, who survived the Holocaust and fled the Communists, is thought to have made in total about $44bn through financial speculation. And he’s used his fortune to fund thousands of education, health, human rights and democracy projects.
Established in 1979, his Open Society Foundations now operate in more than 120 countries around the world. But this bold philanthropy in support of liberal, democratic causes has increasingly made him the bogeyman of the right.
The first conspiracy theories about George Soros appeared in the early 1990s, but they really gained traction after he condemned the 2003 Iraq War and started donating millions of dollars to the US Democratic Party. Ever since, American right-wing commentators and politicians have gone after him with increasing fury and vitriol, and often with scant concern for the facts.
But it was Donald Trump’s election victory that took the attacks on Soros to a new and dangerous level.
Eight months into Trump’s presidency, in August 2017, neo-Nazis held a torchlit procession in Charlottesville, Virginia. Clashes with counter-protesters ended in tragedy, when a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd and killed 32-year-old Heather Heyer.
Among US right-wingers it was soon claimed that the violence was orchestrated and financed by Soros, in order to tarnish the reputation of President Trump. And they said the key to the secret plot was a man called Brennan Gilmore, who filmed the car being driven into the counter-protesters. Right-wing radio host Alex Jones claimed Gilmore was paid $320,000 a year by Soros and was part of a deep-state coup to oust the president.
But any connection was extremely tenuous.
While it’s true that Soros gave $500,000 to the political campaign of Tom Perriello – a Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia whom Gilmore had worked for – there’s no evidence Soros or the Open Society directed or paid protesters at Charlottesville. Gilmore, who never received any money from Soros, is now suing Alex Jones and several others for defamation.
Since then, the attacks on Soros have kept coming, and only intensified.
Last autumn thousands of migrants left Honduras bound for the USA, just a month before the mid-term elections that threatened to weaken Republican control of Congress.
Immediately the so-called migrant caravan was blamed on Soros. Fox News repeatedly broadcast claims that Soros wanted open borders and unrestricted immigration.
Jack Kingston, a former Republican Congressman, told me: “It is a very organised effort and somebody is behind this, somebody is paying for some of this and it would be typical of George Soros to get involved in that.”
For his part, President Trump retweeted a video that claimed to show cash being handed out to people in Honduras to “storm the US border”, with a suggestion that the cash might have come from Soros.
When asked outside the White House whether Soros was funding the migrant caravan, he replied: “I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of people say yes.”
Cindy Jerezano, who travelled with the caravan from her home in Honduras to the US, told me that she was not offered any money and made her own decision to travel nearly 3,000 miles to San Diego.
Cindy was supported, once she arrived in the US, by the Catholic Charities for the Diocese of San Diego. Nadine Toppozada, the charity’s director of refugee and immigrant services, explained that their lawyers interviewed asylum seekers in great detail but had never heard Soros’s name mentioned. Nor had they seen any evidence of Soros involvement.
What’s more, the video President Trump retweeted quickly turned out to be flawed.
Within hours, journalists discovered the footage was not filmed in Honduras as originally claimed, but in the neighbouring country of Guatemala, and a closer look at the clip showed at least one of the supposed aid workers was armed.
The migrant caravan was filmed throughout its entire journey. Local charities were seen helping the migrants. But there is no evidence of Soros funding at any point.
On 27 October 2018, 11 days after the first conspiracy theory surfaced about the migrant caravan, and five days after the pipe bomb was delivered to Soros’s house, a white man armed with an assault rifle and three handguns walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh. There he murdered 11 Jews.
It was the worst act of anti-Semitic violence in US history – and it was carried out by a man obsessed with George Soros.
The social media posts of the gunman, Robert Bowers, revealed he believed in a dark anti-Semitic conspiracy theory called “white genocide”, with Soros as the mastermind.
The theory claims white people are being replaced by immigrants and will ultimately be eliminated. It explains the neo-Nazis’ chant, “Jews will not replace us!” as they marched through Charlottesville.
Joel Finkelstein, director of the Network Contagion Research Institute, discovered one post where Bowers referred to Soros as “the Jew that funds white genocide and controls the press”, and claimed that he pushed for gun control and open borders.
Finkelstein, who has received Open Society funding to investigate what he believes is a growing threat, concludes that white supremacists like Bowers see Soros as a Jewish mastermind pulling the strings. “These violent actors are justifying their violence by pointing to Soros as a supreme form of evil,” he says.
The vilification of George Soros has spread far beyond the US, to Armenia, Australia, Honduras, the Philippines, Russia and many other countries.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused Soros of being at the heart of a Jewish conspiracy to “divide” and “shatter” Turkey and other nations.
In Italy, former deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini accused him of wanting to fill the country with migrants because “he likes slaves”.
The leader of the UK’s Brexit Party, Nigel Farage, has claimed Soros is “actively encouraging people… to flood Europe” and “in many ways is the biggest danger to the entire Western World”.
But one country, and one government, has gone further than any other to attack Soros. It is his birthplace, Hungary, where he has spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding free school meals, human rights projects and even a new university.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his populist nationalist government claim that Soros has a secret plot to flood Hungary with migrants and destroy their nation.